Out on the crossroads of the Denver ‘burbs, there are still a few folks waving signs, usually of a Rightish, anti-abortion persuasion, hand-drawn, inevitably red-and-blue on white card. They were out in their dozens yesterday before the debate, right and left then, a plethora of causes from Rasta posters demanding legal dope, to the ever-reliable Lyndon LaRouchites, who now have Obama and Romney sporting Hitler ‘taches, and all points between.

Now, only the Republican Right remain, and who can blame them. Passing them in a cab, watching these lumpy white people holding their signs high each time someone honked, one had the same feel one gets observing people in love, from outside its charmed circle. They were grinning, they were relieved, they were vindicated. They had that rarest of emotions in politics, happiness. Bastards.

The night before, America had gone to bed with the generally expressed opinion that Obama had had a disappointing night in the first debate and Romney had had a clear win — with only a few outliers, on Right and Left, believing it had been an unutterable disaster for the President — Chris Matthews, old-skool Democrat loyalist from MSNBC, was practically shouting out through the screen “where was the President tonight? Where was the President?”, while on Fox, the panel was doing its best not to look like a bunch of jackals rolling in the guts of a rotting bison, and focused instead on how much more Romney needs to do and so on. But by this morning, the narrative had changed, or intensified beyond measure. Romney’s win was absolute, his performance outstanding. The President was battered and tired, he had made no clear points, he had landed no blows. From right and left, the chorus was now that this was the game-changer Romney needed.

Bill Kristol said that he had dispelled all the accumulated doubts about having the character to be president, while Andrew Sullivan — once conservative, and now a fervent centrist Obama supporter — called it a “disaster — that may have lost Obama the election”, while Vermont senator Bernie Sanders (a self-described socialist) claimed that Obama was failing, because he was self-censoring so many of the attacks he would otherwise make on Romney’s policies. But all agreed that it was a disaster, and through the day on the cable news networks flowed plentifully with free and helpful advice from the studio-bound peanut gallery. The best that was said was from long-time Democrat operatives such as Robert Shrum, who noted that it was far from a knockout blow for Romney, that the President was playing a tight game, and that there were would be no substantial gain for Romney from the encounter.

This was all very vexing to your correspondent, who last night called the encounter a draw. I appear to have been virtually alone in that, and I had to go back to the tape to see why my vision of it was so skewed, aside from sheer barracking. Was it the fact that I had been travelling for 20 hours straight, and was watching the thing on a pint of J&B and Sudafed at the Denver University student union, where any Romney fratboy in blue suit and white shirt would have been lynched with his red tie? Maybe, maybe.

Attentive Crikey readers will remember my suggestion a couple of months back that the S-x and the City movie could be made watchable by turning on the Spanish dub, and thinking of it as an Almodovar film about ageing drag queens. Seems to me this approach could spawn a whole new school of film criticism (another example is Ridley Scott’s space-opera dog Prometheus, which I saw on a plane, the shonky AV system reducing it to a series of white-noise and static shot visuals, desynched from the sound — turning the thing into a Chris Marker-style film essay on human origins, a companion piece to La Jetee. I invite readers to make other suggestions of how films can be improved, in the comments string. If you ran Japanese Story backward, would it become an actually interesting movie, a magical realist tale about an irritating woman whose loneliness is solved by finding an Asian man-spirit come to life in a billabong? Etc).

My supposition is that my own tiredness lag, etc, had a similar effect on my view of the debate, but that that did not necessarily mean that it was a false one. It’s true that Mitt Romney was energetic and forceful throughout the debate, that he managed to land some key blows, and get out a couple of gags — though they were hardly the “zingers” everyone was claiming they’d be — and that Obama didn’t go on the attack, using Romney’s plentiful “Kinsley gaffes” (gaffes created by telling the truth) to make mincemeat of him. Obama allowed Romney’s false claim that Obamacare would take $716 billion from the aged Medicare program — it is a projected reduction in funding increases over 10 years, and the GOP agreed to it –– he never pushed hard enough to link Romney’s healthcare plan to Obamacare, and he failed to attack the House Republicans for their failure to compromise.

Polling today suggests that these and other omissions caused 67% of the 62 million viewers to score it as a Romney win, and only 21% to give it to Obama — pretty much two-thirds of the rusted-on Democrats who would be watching the show, and precious few independents.

But such a poll was a measure of who people thought had the better night, and that is quite a different thing to what was achieved on the night. Barack Obama is capable of turning in good and bad performances, and a sitting President is always at a disadvantage in debates — he or she has a country to run, their opponent has nothing to do but practise, and, in the US, has already gone through a gruelling series of primary contests. You never know what might be on a President’s mind in the days or hours before such a debate — for the past two days Turkey, a NATO member, has been attacking Syria, claiming defence against Syrian attacks on Turkish soil. Since Turkey has invoked NATO solidarity, it is no small matter, and any conscientious leader would at least be occupied by such, and God knows what else. So all that, and much more may have added to Obama’s second-rate performance.Others detected his notorious occasional attacks of impatience and diffidence, an impatience with the act of politics that was never displayed by a Clinton or a Reagan. There would be no surprise that Obama is impatient with the crowded clown-car that is the current Republican political machine, nor with Mitt Romney’s willingness to kowtow to it — compared to the real process of avoiding a great depression, steering a foreign policy path through the Middle East meltdown, and much more besides, it must be particularly galling to have to spar with a man of such little conviction as Mitt Romney. But it has to be done, and that is the work of politics, and Obama, last night, did not do it that well.

But that is a far cry from saying that the strategy deployed was a failure, or unthought-through. There are various stories circulating about the Obama team being in meltdown over the result, which may or may not be true. But the NUBO principle (Never Underestimate Barack Obama, for newbies) extends to his campaign as well, and it would be foolish not to look for a deeper process at work. For Romney was clearly more assertive, and commanding, and gave conservative pundits a shiver down their leg, and Obama sounded careful, and considered and , in that respect, a little fey — but that is only true in the hyper-aggressive punditry-bubble, where US political commentators, male and female, live. But there’s another world out there, where things are thought through differently, and it may be to those people that Obama was speaking.

Who are those people? Well, for better and worse, they can be easily named: they’re women. Watching the debate, one also watched the worm, measuring the response of independent voters hooked up to the polling IV by cable TV. Romney got his dips and his big rises, especially among men, whenever he got onto the greatest country on earth flim-flam — but Obama’s pitch, low-key and nuts and bolts, gained a consistent higher approval rating from women, the response of genders being conveniently separated on the worm’s real-time tracking.

That, of course, is the strategy, has always been the strategy — that Obama would win African-Americans, Hispanics, but would never win vanilla white men, even when his policies had been in their interests. To analyse this takes you into the lower depths of human emotion — about the irrational reasons why people vote. Men, men of all classes, and especially American men, like glory and bullshit, and we’re not going to take any shit — it’s a familiar trope of empire, always has been, it’s how the British Tories retained a working-class vote over more than a century, it’s at the root of the Nixon-Reagan Democrat phenomenon.

Women? Women are different, like it or not. They remain the household budgeters, the domestically oriented, and in that sense, the greater realists. They listen more carefully to what is said about things that pertain to household stuff, whether it’s taxes, or the extension of care via Obama’s health plan, or whatever. They have their own matching irrationality too — experience shows they can be more easily reached by fear, of the unknown, of bold schemes, of aggressiveness, of audacity, unless a society is on the brink of actual disaster. That is why conservative parties usually have the edge as far as women are concerned — and why leaders who combine audacity and aggression, such as Mark Latham, can find themselves subject to a serious and fatal gender gap.

The great reversal of this election is that Obama is the conservative. Women running households have noted the tax credits, the early provisions of Obamacare — compelling insurance for pre-existing conditions, no corporate ceiling on care — and the way in which the rolling unemployment has been slowed, and in key swing states, reversed. They’ve noted that the GOP’s craziness on abortion, and reflected on “difficult situations” in their own lives, or their friends, or their daughters, and that has had its effect too.

The GOP has trumpeted its traditional values, but in reality, they have become the dangerous radicals, the enemies of grounded life, where nothing is clear-cut, and the ultimate value is lived life itself, not some abstract fusion of Jerry Falwell and Ayn Rand. If there’s a rational theory of Obama’s performance on debate night, it’s that — allowing Romney to become his full blowhardness, knowing full well that a section of the male viewership are thrilling to it, while a larger section of women are listening very closely to what he’s staying about the nuts-and-bolts.

That split would be an easy one for conservatives to miss, given that many do not understand how radical their schemes are — seeing them as a conservative fidelity to the original American vision, forgetting that the country was built on small farms and slave plantations, neither of them the terrifying anomic corporate world of the contemporary US. There’s no shortage of women in this right-wing phalanx — but they too have little experience of average household life, either being anorexic raptors in the Ann Coulter mode, or driven Jesus-freak superwomen with eight kids raised by illegal immigrants. Many people just trying to muddle through, identify with Obama’s piecemeal version of a tough slog, averting disaster, and slowly improving.

Should that turn out to be the theory behind the practice, then we shall see something that will be, to the right wing pundits, bewildering — a debate Romney has unquestionably won, delivering no great poll bump. Should that occur, the folks on the crossroads may still be out there, but the grins will be wiped from their faces afresh. Or from ours. Transformers, that’s another one. Watch it in French, it all makes sense.